Tag: punk

Radical Solidarities in Punk and Queer Refusals of Safety and Inclusion Narratives in Planning

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Urban Planning Vol 8, No 2 (2023): Queer(ing) Urban Planning and Municipal Governance

Abstract:  Recent call-outs against Ottawa punk venues have fueled public debates about safe space and the inclusivity of local music scenes. The Ottawa Music Strategy released in 2018 translated these debates into cultural development policy that links creative placemaking and safe space discourse. This article examines the civic response to activist call-outs by analyzing how the Ottawa Music Strategy integrates diversity and inclusion strategies into cultural policy, and how cultural policy and safe space policies intersect with cultural revitalization and economic development priorities in the Ottawa Official Plan. Punk counter-narratives developed through grounded ethnographic research in the Ottawa punk scene unsettle normative public safety narratives that frame punk spaces as unsafe. Place-based histories of anti-oppression tactics, logics, and traditions of punk space and activism contextualize alternative responses by local punk venues and promoters. Drawing upon literature in queer planning and queer geography and literature on intersections between radical queer and punk politics, spatialities, and identities, this article discusses punking planning in solidarity with queering planning through alternative community-based responses to issues of safety, inclusion, and participation.

Keywords:  creative placemaking; cultural planning; punk; queer planning; spatial justice

Published:   22 May 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v8i2.6372

“Did You Hear? Mavericks Is Closing!” Punk Refusal of Gentrified Endings

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GeoHumanities Volume 9, 2023 – Issue 1 Abstract: Decades of experience with closed, relocated, and renamed venues, make punks very familiar with cycles of gentrification. Often established in edge neighborhoods, punk venues participate in reproducing the “grit” of urban decline and subculture. Urban revitalization plans that promise community, livability, and culture, rarely leave spaces for established punk community and subculture. The newly branded Retail, Arts, and Theatre District in Ottawa, Canada is a case study in cultural urban development that operationalizes creative placemaking and its future-oriented visions of urban revitalization through cultural spaces and activities. Although the city’s Official Plan celebrates that existing cultural venues add diversity to the district, the pressure placed on punk venues by surrounding development reveal that not all venues are to be recognized by the city as legitimate or desirable forms of either diversity or culture. Close readings of official city planning documents, urban histories, development proposals, and marketing literature are juxtaposed with auto-ethnographic, storytelling, punk histories, and song writing. I argue that punk counter-cultural placemaking practices provide counter-information, counter-environments, and counter-temporalities to space in the city to resist gentrification and refuse displacement as endings. Gentrification kills punk. But punk always comes back, finds new places, haunts old sites, and remembers its past. Key Words: creative placemaking, gentrification, punk, revitalization, urban planning Published: 14 Apr 2023 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2023.2180418 

Practicing Performances of Punk Anarchism in the Academy

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Anarchist Essays #40. Loughborough University’s Anarchism Research Group.

In this essay, Sarah Gelbard reflects on the messy relationship between punk, anarchy, and anarchism and ways it can be conceived of as identity, politics, scene, performance, and/or practice. For punks in academia and academics studying punk, how do we position ourselves in relation to the work, to power, and with our comrades?

Not My City: songwriting as research text

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8 July 2020 (conference postponed to 2021)
KISMIF: Keep It Simple Make It Fast, Conference. Porto, Portugal.

in the dark on empty streets deserted parks and alleys […]

The future-oriented utopian cities of urban planning imaginaries sit in stark contrast to actual or existing cities. Behind policies for beautification and rejuvenation is the socio-political ugliness of capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, and racism. In some of the most depressed and ugly parts of the city, we can find spaces of resistance based in camaraderie, mutual-aid, care, and joy. My doctoral research looks to marginalized and alternative urban groups for ways to reinterpret, resist, and refuse mainstream urban narratives and planning practices.

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Future dis-oriented and punk placemaking

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26 October 2019
Presented at ACSP Annual Meeting, Greenville SC

“We shall define planning as future-oriented, public decision-making directed toward attaining specific goals.” (Fainstein & Fainstein 1971)

For decades, marxist, feminist, indigenous, and black scholars have offered critical deconstruction of the different expressions of democracy and rationality in planning and the ways they privilege capitalist, patriarchal, settler-colonial, Western interests. They have challenged the desire for justice, order, and efficiency—recognizing that these are hegemonic constructs supported by institutions that have historically and continue to exclude and burden marginalized groups. Far less attention has been focused on targeting and challenging the third defining criteria of planning, its future-orientation. When pursued uncritically, this future-orientation similarly risks reproducing hegemonic forms of oppression and exclusion. One potential dimension through which to consider why and how marginalized groups are excluded from planning is through their alternative temporalities, including the negation of future. What is the future planning plans for and who is the public planning plans for? What power does planning have to shape the public by planning towards a specific future? How do non-conforming and marginalized groups resist the normalizing forces of the future public and of a public future? Continue reading “Future dis-oriented and punk placemaking” →

No future. Punk planning, agonistics, and anarchism

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6 April 2019
Presenting at: AAG Annual Meeting, Washington D.C.

Don’t be told what you want
Don’t be told what you need
There’s no future
No future
No future for you

(Sex Pistols, 1977)

Top-down vs. bottom-up. Western vs. Eastern. Global North vs. South. These are the usual binary positions from which planning is approached and theorized. Even as planning theory continues the important work of interrogating who is included in their definition of the public, it continues to fail to consider those who are not included and what non-inclusion means for the city. Radicals, discontents, delinquents, undesirables: these are some of the non-public participants, or perhaps more-than-public participants in the city. Planners too easily forget that placemaking can, most frequently does, and historically has occurred through non-rational, non-predictive, non-deliberative, and non-prefigurative actions. While theories such as counterpublics (Fraser, 1990), subcultures (Hebdige, 1979), or undercommons (Moten & Harney, 2013) acknowledge nonconformity to the normative definition of the public culture, they are still etymological prefixed and conceptually predicated on a spatial relationship to the politically-defined plane of the public realm. Beyond binaries, negation is an important space of subversion and difference. One potential dimension through which to consider why and how some of these non-publics are excluded from planning is through their negation of future.
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Ask a punk: from informality to anti-formality and anti-authority and when to say fuck

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10 February 2018

Presented at: Curating Resistance: Punk as Archival Method, Los Angeles CA

Sometimes you can’t design your research. Sometimes the city is what happens while you’re busy making plans. What are the linkages between tactical approaches to punk place-making and punk knowledge-making? As a doctoral candidate researching punk space in the city, specifically as it intersects with formal urban planning processes, I find striking analogies between my academic struggles and punk place-making. The qualitative-(re)turn in the social sciences has extended legitimacy to a variety of alternative research methods. In the process of formalization and institutionalization, in many instances the underlying conceptual and ethical arguments for the diversification of methodological approaches are buried if not entirely lost. Continue reading “Ask a punk: from informality to anti-formality and anti-authority and when to say fuck” →

‘Parking Lot Citys an Ugly Place’ Punk Inverted Images of Capital City

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11 April 2018

Presented at: American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, New Orleans LA

Does Ottawa even have a punk scene? Yes, buried beneath the carefully curated and manicured image of the National Capital, the punk scene hides… in plain sight. What about our image of punk and our image of Ottawa make their coexistence in the same space so unimaginable? Perhaps more importantly, from whose perspective and for whose ends are those images constructed? While the planning interests of “town and crown” notoriously and continually conflict, they are allowed to coexist and together form and reinforce the city’s identity. Perhaps it is because both agree that the National Capital ought to uphold the Great Canadian myth of multiculturalism and neoliberal democratic expectations of a safe, inclusive, and accessible city. Continue reading “‘Parking Lot Citys an Ugly Place’ Punk Inverted Images of Capital City” →

“Fuck gentrification” is the new “fuck the man”: the desirability of undesirable punk space

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21 September 2017

Presented at: 1st International Conference of Anarchist Geographies and Geographers (ICAGG) Reggio Emilia, Italy

Urban planning as it formalized throughout the twentieth century offers a particular relationship and conceptual continuity between the social, spatial, and political that structure the relationships between people, space, and institutions and connects city-making with both place-making and citizen-making. But the city-making project of planning has a “darkside”; one that draws a line between desirable and undesirable people, and between desirable and undesirable spaces. Planning becomes plagued by contradictions and conflicts, both internally and externally, as it tries to reconcile its progressive role and utopian vision with the capitalistic, liberal and democratic systems under which it was formed and continues to operate. The internal inconsistencies are frequently exacerbated to the level of crisis when planning is further confronted with the seeming irreconcilability with another significant part of its ontological heritage—the moral and ethical imperative to act in the public interest. Continue reading ““Fuck gentrification” is the new “fuck the man”: the desirability of undesirable punk space” →